Kiki's Delivery Service

The 1989 anime version by Studio Ghibli of the original novel by Eiko Kadono tells the story of the young girl Kiki, who to prove her abilities as a witch has to survive on her own for a year. The Ghibli director, Miyazaki, interpreted this as symbolic of the conflicts in contemporary Japanese society of young girls having to find their identity in the world. The story features a flying broomstick, Jiji the talking cat, and Tombo, a geeky boy obsessed with aviation, and is set in a fictional town, somewhere in Scandinavia.

Kiki's Delivery Service (1989) tells an old story: boy meets girl. But the girl, Kiki, is learning to be a witch, and the boy is also mad on flying, so the film manages to combine two of Miyazaki's favourite themes: magic and aviation.

The caption on this cinema poster reads: "Well, sometimes I feel down, but I'm OK." Kiki in pensive mood as she looks after the bakery where she works, with the delightful name Gütiokipänja made from the game of jankenpon (Gü=gu=stone, tioki=choki=scissors, pä=pa=paper, and panja is a Germanic spelling of pan-ya or bakery in Japanese).

Studio Ghibli

Founded by Hayao Miyazaki in 1985, Studio Ghibli is an animation film studio which has produced a string of internationally acclaimed full-length feature animations. We also include Miyazaki's earlier work, films such as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, produced by the forerunner company Topcraft.